Have you kited at Waddell Creek for the first time recently, or are you planning to soon? If so, you need to click on this link to some guidelines that one of BAK's resident wave shredders, Gabe Brown, wrote up. Print them out and take them to the beach with you, then read them while you sit in your car watching the locals ride the waves. At least two newbie kiters out at Waddell today would have avoided gear damage, long swims, and general resentment from the local riders if they had read this helpful and informative piece.

What happened? Maybe the kiters who got in trouble could post their experience so other people who plan to start riding there for the first time know what to avoid and the type of skills that they need.

When you said newbie, are the kiters just plain beginners or is it their first time kiting on a wave spot, no wave riding/surfing experience at all?

I'm a Santa Cruz local surfer and an early intermediate kiter, and am planning to start riding there sometime in the summer.... have sacrificed a whole year driving to the Bay Area to get really good with my skill set before riding my home breaks with a kite.

It would really suck for guys like me to get vibed the first time I try to ride my home break because of this single incident.

Yea, good point Rey... It would be nice to put the incident into perspective if we could get the missing input from the kiters involved or atleast the complete story... otherwise how can we learn from the mistakes that others make?

"The incident" in question is the same thing that happens every year, which is why someone posts a reminder about the guidelines every spring.
People kite at Waddell without reading up, talking to other kiters on the beach, or even watching for a while before they launch. I don't think that last sentence applies to you guys.

Basically, Waddell is different in many important ways from every other kitespot in Norcal, and if you don't spend some time figuring it out, you're going to have some bad interactions. Gabe's writeup does a pretty good job of explaining it. One of his points that I think can be emphasized is that if you are still on a twintip and aren't riding down the line yet, maybe think about riding at one of the other windy spots on the coast where you don't have alot of very aggressive, down-the-line ridings coming at you when you are trying to get off the beach. I have seen people literally scared shitless when they see me coming down the line across their tack. Or they're pissed because they think they have the right of way.

When I referred to gear damage and physical, I was talking about kites and body parts getting trashed in the waves, BTW, which is a very real consequence of kiting there. One guy on Sunday had a 2 inch gash in his foot from where his board fin hit him when he got dumped by a wave. Another guy got his kite ripped to pieces on like his second or third tack.